NYC to South Bronx, Latino Drug Users: No Feliz Navidad

While our public health and elected officials are publicly talking about plans to end the AIDS epidemic, the heroin epidemic, and the opioid overdose epidemic, they are diffidently making decisions which hurt our chances on all of these fronts. Harm reduction interventions, including syringe exchanges are not only the most cost effective intervention for preventing the transmission of HIV and HCV, these programs also train people who use drugs in opioid overdose prevention, and they are the front-lines on the emerging heroin epidemic. That is why we're asking ourselves and you, "Why did the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) cut St. Ann's Corner Harm Reduction's funding by $50,000 halfway through the contract year?"

This week, we received our contract from DOHMH 6 months after the fiscal year began. We have been delivering services for this contract without being paid for half a year. At this point, DOHMH saw fit to reduce our grant by over 18 percent, which is a 5 percent reduction in our overall operating budget. This contract change came with no warning and no explanation. Year after year, we provide significantly more services than are required in our contract. We have always worked with DOHMH to be a research site and to help create partnerships in the community. Is cutting funding to SACHR, a consistent community partner, an effective collaboration strategy?

The South Bronx is ground zero for HIV, HCV, and overdose. We have been providing life stabilizing prevention services to Latino New Yorkers for 25 years since the beginning of the HIV epidemic. As the need for our services has grown in recent years, our budget has shrunk. Before these cuts, we should have been receiving three times the budget in order to properly address the need for our services. We have always made the small funding we receive go a long way. This most recent cut has had clear negative impacts on the people we serve. We have laid off our outreach team, ended our free breakfast program, eliminated 50 percent of data entry capacity, eliminated acupuncture services, and reduced the metro-cards that we distribute to program participants in order to enable them to go to medical appointments. Is the DOHMH trying to re-start a contained HIV epidemic among South Bronx and Latino injection drug users?

Not only has our program been a lifeline for people who use drugs, we are also a bridge to care for homeless New Yorkers. New York City has seen a significant increase in homelessness, and our services are one way to help connect people living on the streets to housing and healthcare. In fact, we were providing outreach at the homeless encampment Mayor De Blasio dubbed, "The Hole". We were connecting people who were living in "The Hole" to services until the Mayor and the New York Police Department came and evicted everyone. We still remain connected to some of the homeless individuals who were living in the encampment. They regularly come to our drop in center for assistance with housing, to get a warm meal, or to take a shower. Does it make any pragmatic sense to cut funding from "La Cueva/The Cave" as SACHR is called by participants when SACHR offers daily (Mon-Fri) respite from the streets to poor and homeless drug users who would be out in the streets seeking another 'Hole'?

For the thousands of New Yorkers we reach every year, the $50,000 in cuts by DOHMH and associated reduction in staff and services will mean greater hardships on their lives. For the participants in our program there is nothing Feliz about this Navidad, instead DOHMH decided homeless, Latino, drug users in the South Bronx deserve coal in the form of increasing risks for overdose, HIV, HCV, and a life of struggle on the streets. The reckless liberties the DOHMH has taken with City Council dollars will be paid for in loss of life and community.

DOHMH will say it redistributed those dollars to our fellow IDUHA partners. We question this policy of divide and conquer, and we will not be distracted. It shouldn't be hard for the DOHMH to reach into another pot of money to reinstate the $50K it carved out of SACHR's back.

Joyce A. Rivera is the Founder & Executive Director of St. Ann's Corner of Harm Reduction

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